There is considerable interest world-wide in producing chemical feedstock, such as fatty acids, for industrial use from renewable plant sources rather than from non-renewable petrochemicals. This concept has broad appeal to manufacturers and consumers on the basis of resource conservation and provides a significant opportunity to develop new industrial crops for agriculture.
There is a diverse array of unusual fatty acids in nature and these have been well characterized (Badam & Patil, 1981; Smith, 1970). Many of these unusual fatty acids have industrial potential and this has led to interest in domesticating such species to enable agricultural production of particular fatty acids.
One class of fatty acids of particular interest are the epoxy-fatty acids, consisting of an acyl chain in which two adjacent carbon bonds are linked by an epoxy bridge. Due to their high reactivity, they have considerable application in the production of coatings, resins, glues, plastics, surfactants and lubricants. These fatty acids are currently produced by chemical epoxidation of vegetable oils, mainly soybean oil and linseed oil, however this process produces mixtures of multiple and isomeric forms and involves significant processing costs.
Attempts are being made by others to develop some wild plants that contain epoxy fatty acids (e.g. Euphorbia lagascae, or Vernonia galamensis) into commercial sources of these oils. However, problems with agronomic suitability and low yield potential severely limit the commercial utility of traditional plant breeding and cultivation approaches.
The rapidly increasing sophistication of recombinant DNA technology is greatly facilitating the efficiency of commercially-important industrial processes, by the expression of genes isolated from a first organism or species in a second organism or species to confer novel phenotypes thereon. More particularly, conventional industrial processes can be made more efficient or cost-effective, resulting in greater yields per unit cost by the application of recombinant DNA techniques.
Moreover, the appropriate choice of host organism for the expression of a genetic sequence of interest provides for the production of compounds that are not normally produced or synthesized by the host, at a high yield and purity.
However, despite the general effectiveness of recombinant DNA technology, the isolation of genetic sequences which encode important enzymes in fatty acid metabolism, in particular the genes which encode the fatty acid Δ12-epoxygenase enzymes responsible for producing 12,13-epoxy-9-octadecenoic acid (vernolic acid) and 12,13-epoxy-9,15-octadecadienoic acid, amongst others, remains a major obstacle to the development of genetically-engineered organisms which produce these fatty acids.
Until the present invention, there were only limited biochemical data indicating the nature of fatty acid epoxygenase enzymes, in particular Δ12-epoxygenases. However, in Euphorbia lagascae, the formation of 12,13-epoxy-9-octadecenoic acid (vernolic acid) from linoleic acid appears to be catalyzed by a cytochrome-P450-dependent Δ12 epoxygenase enzyme (Bafor et al., 1993; Blee et al., 1994). Additionally, developing seed of linseed plants have the capability to convert added vernolic acid to 12,13-epoxy-9,15-octadecadienoic acid by an endogenous Δ15 desaturase (Engeseth and Stymne, 1996). Epoxy-fatty acids can also be produced by a peroxide-dependent peroxygenase in plant tissues (Blee and Schuber, 1990).
In work leading up to the present invention, the inventors sought to isolate genetic sequences which encode genes which are important for the production of epoxy-fatty acids, such as 12,13-epoxy-9-octadecenoic acid (vernolic acid) or 12,13-epoxy-9,15-octadecadienoic acid and to transfer these genetic sequences into highly productive commercial oilseed plants and/or other oil accumulating organisms.